The Yellow Meeple’s First Impressions 3rd April – 9th April

It’s nice when you come across new games unexpectedly. We went to our usual Sunday board game club expecting a very quiet affair since a weekend-long convention was happening just down the road. I was hoping to play some of our older titles like Stone Age and Ghost Stories, but instead we got to try out one new game and one new expansion.

Here’s are Yellow Meeple’s first impressions;

 

·         Fearsome Floors is a Friedemann Friese game that definitely likes to play on the use of the letter ‘F’, especially in the flavour text in the instructions. In the game you are trying to make your way out of a crypt and avoid being eaten by the monster who guards the exit. The monster is a nice touch as it is a creature of your own creation which you make out of the selection of bodies, arms and legs in the box. Whilst you try and be the first player to move all but one of your characters to the exit, hiding behind rocks, slipping over pools of blood and generally trying to ensure your opponents are eaten first, at the end of every turn the monster will take it’s varied number of movement, generally walking in a straight line, unless it has line of sight to a player token. The game is really an abstract strategy game, but the monster, character art and cool thematic elements in the crypt really add a theme here. The game is very simple, but there is often a fair amount of tactics involved in your movement, although there is a tendency to be caught in a situation that you can’t avoid with the monster if you’re unlucky. Fearsome Floors is a nice, lightweight game that I’d be very happy to play again.

               

·         Castle Panic: The Wizard’s Tower is the expansion everyone shouted at me for not trying when I wrote my review of Castle Panic and said it was too easy for adult players. I did not buy the expansion, seeing no need to spend more money on a game I wasn’t enjoying, but instead donated Castle Panic to a friend who has since expanded it. The Wizard’s Tower add a plethora of new monsters with lots of special rules and abilities, which definitely add interest to the game but for me the need to have a large players aid to explain all of their rules does somewhat ruin the flow of gameplay. It also adds a new deck of cards which you can draw from when you discard. In our game this deck did seem to bring interesting, powerful opportunities, but quite early on we were made to discard these and then eventually the tower was also destroyed so we could no longer draw them. Overall this meant the game was definitely hard. In fact it was a foregone conclusion quite early on that we could not win. This expansion does seem to make the game harder, like people promised, but it doesn’t add some extra decision making that would’ve improved the game for me, it’s kind of just more of the same, adding some interesting new monsters but fundamentally doing the same thing.

This weekend we’re heading to a house party where we expect to find some fellow board game geeks to perhaps try out some new games or maybe just some old favourites like Telestrations or Jamaica which suit a larger group. I’m also really keen for Amy to show me Imperial Assault now that we own the game and she has played a campaign.